"That was what you did. You died." Tenente lives. War goes on.

A few days back, I read the final words of A Farewell to Arms. (prior posts here and here.)

Felt so empty inside when it ended that I had to wait out a couple of days before blogging this. 

Hemingway simply sucked everything out of me with the anti-war story where the American protagonist signs up to serve in the medical corps of the Italian army in order to fight the good war, ends up deserting that only to have the military come after him because of his AWOL status as an officer, flees to neutral Switzerland with his British "wife" who is pregnant ... and then Hemingway lets the wife die after a difficult birth of a stillborn child. That is simply too cruel!

... So, that was it. The baby was dead. That was why the doctor looked so tired. But why had they acted the way they did in the room with him? They supposed he would come around and start breathing probably. I had no religion but I knew he ought to have been baptized. But what if he never breathed at all. He hadn't. He had never been alive. Except in Catherine. I'd felt him kick there often enough. But I hadn't for a week. Maybe he was choked all the time. Poor little kid. I wished the hell I'd been choked like that. No I didn't. Sill there would not be all this dying to go through. Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they kileld you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

It was like how I used to feel after watching one of those older Malayalam movies back in India.  Those days, one could expect nothing but tragedies in those movies, and the cynical joke was that not only the hero and the heroine but the dog also died!

I suppose the consolation is that Tenente survives it all.

After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

 

Caption at the source:
MORA DE EBRO, Spain—Hemingway on the front lines with members of Gen. Enrique Lister’s Loyalist 5th Regiment who were holding out against Gen. Franco's offensive, Nov. 5, 1937.